Generating qualified apartment leads isn't about flaunting Fair Housing laws at all. Rather, it's about using your marketing to reach the people who have already chosen that they want to find a community like yours.
One of the questions that comes up sometimes when we talk about getting qualified apartment traffic is how that can be reconciled with Fair Housing laws. It's a reasonable concern because if you aren't careful it's very easy to start talking about lead qualification in a way that doesn't jibe with Fair Housing. So what do we mean when we talk about qualifying your leads?
Well, to begin we do not mean doing things that blatantly violate Fair Housing. We've had clients or prospects ask us in the past about how they could get more of one race (really) or more of one religious group in their community. That's a blatant Fair Housing violation and anything of the sort is illegal. So don't do that.
What we mean when we talk about qualifying your leads and attracting qualified apartment traffic is less about you as the apartment community choosing who you want to market to and is much more about creating marketing that engages prospects who are more likely to choose you. As Jacob put it in a recent seminar, "targeted marketing isn't about discriminating to get the people you want to find, but about reaching the people that want to find you."
This is a subtle difference, but it's an important one. If you're a luxury community, there are certain people who want to find you. So your marketing should be done in such a way that you reach them. What we're talking about here is efficiency in your marketing. If your marketing is able to connect with more engaged leads, that makes everyone's life easier. It saves your leasing staff time. It saves the prospect the time of driving around town to tour 20 different communities. And it saves your community money by reducing the amount of work associated with leasing a new unit.
One company we work with recently told us that they expect to lease a unit after two showings. Think about the ramifications of that for your community--fewer tours, perhaps fewer leasing agents, less time wasted on bad leads that aren't going anywhere, less time spent paying for vacant units. The benefits are numerous.
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